Tuesday, 17 December 2013

Trailer Trash: Kill the Rapist (2014)

The jury is out on whether this is going to be any good, but I really like the 'you decide' gimmick: call in to vote on whether the rapist should be ritually slaughtered! I would love to see the poll results, and I'm curious to see if the alternative end will be included as a DVD bonus (if it is even shot).

4 comments:

Steve, DC Comics way back in the '80s did something similar with its Robin character. Readers could call in and vote on whether or not the character should die. In these types of polls, voters usually vote for death. It is an interesting gimmick, but as a writer of fiction the thought of letting an audience decide where a story goes just bothers me in so many ways.

My take on it is that I doubt they'll even film an ending where the rapist survives. They haven't gone as far as phrasing the question 'you don't was a rapist to get away with it do you?', but the typeface leads towards the "right thing to do".I'm writing a paper on rape-revenge at the moment on this topic. The rape-revenge set-up does a great deal of elaborate work and uses an emotively charged subject to not only justify but to encourage audiences to support murder. I'm the first to cheer on rapists being castrated, tortured and killed when watching these films, but it is disturbing that we are encouraged not to question the fact that we are rallying for pre-meditated, cold-blooded homicide. Kill the Rapist takes the usual logic a step further by asking us to move from advocating what amounts to publically displayed capital punishment to actively voting for slaughter. No matter how the vote swings, morally speaking this is a zero-sum game.

If they did film an ending where he survives (which I also doubt, and I doubt it would get the votes anyway), I believe he would still have something horrible happen. Nobody questioned it in the comic, either.